


running through these walls

by mimosaeyes



Category: Carmen Sandiego (Cartoon 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Confrontations, F/F, Mutual Pining, except not really because they both just want things to be okay again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-27 17:50:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21122813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimosaeyes/pseuds/mimosaeyes
Summary: “Let’s say I believe that you think I’m some Robin Hood type. Let’s say I even believe you didn’t know you were the bait in a trap set for me.”She takes a deep breath. “I still nearly died because I trusted you. How am I supposed to move on, like that never happened?”Or: After Sweden, Jules shouldn’t call Carmen. But she does.Carmen shouldn’t still trust Jules. But she does, apparently.Set in 2x09.





	running through these walls

**Author's Note:**

> Me, watching that lingering gaze when Carmen thinks Julia betrayed her: ohoho that’s some quality Gay Drama™ right there
> 
> Also me, realising that by the end of season 2 Carmen still thinks Julia betrayed her, _and Julia knows it_: wait nooooo
> 
> And thus, this fic.

“…58, 59, aaand 60. Time’s up, Carmen!”

When two seconds go by without a response from her friend, Ivy repeats sternly, “Time’s up. That means _you get_ up.”

Still holding her static pose, Carmen grouses, “This used to be a piece of cake for me.” Now, her arms are quivering after only a minute, and her face, while not quite as red as her top, is getting there.

Ivy tsks. “Yeah, but that was before you nearly died of exposure in the Swedish winter. Come on, already.” Her voice softens. “You’re still recovering.”

“I’ve gotta get my strength back somehow.” Resolute, Carmen narrows her eyes at the pattern of wood planks inches from her face.

It only makes Ivy change tacks.

“Shadowsan’ll kill me if he finds out I let you do even this much. Actually _kill_ me, Carmen. Do you want that on your conscience?” 

Growling in frustration, Carmen finally lets her muscles relax, and sits cross-legged on the ground. She’s not above pouting in this situation.

“Good choice. And I, in turn, will choose to ignore that pout.”

“Ignore what pout?” comes Player’s voice from the red laptop set up on the coffee table. 

Ivy leans forward and turns him around to face Carmen.

“Oof. Yup, that’s a serious one.”

Carmen crosses her arms over her chest indignantly. Having friends is all fun and games (and international heists) until they start ganging up on you like this.

She brushes some loose strands of hair out of her face. “I’m going stir crazy here, Player. Tell me you have good news from the outside world. Shadowsan had to wear a non-greyscale colour for a caper. Or Tigress broke one of her kitty claws. I’ll take anything.”

He hesitates. “Define ‘good’ news.”

“Well, _that_ doesn’t sound promising.” Smirking at her friend, Carmen scoots closer to the laptop. The low table puts it at just the right height for her. “Just tell me.” 

“Someone’s been trying to contact you on the dark web,” Player says, all in a rush. “It’s been happening for a while now. I didn’t wanna tell you until you were back to 110%, but, well, it looks like you’re off the couch today.”

“Wait wait wait, slow down.” Ivy holds her hands up like she’s trying to calm a spooked horse. “Why’s this important? Don’t you run interference when this happens?”

“Normally, yes. But…”

Player looks at Carmen, trying to gauge her reaction so far. She notices, and keeps her face carefully blank.

“This time, I’m pretty sure it’s Agent Argent.”

“…Jules,” Carmen breathes.

Her heart skips a beat, despite herself. She tries to keep the welling emotions out of her voice as she asks, “H-how do you know?”

“I triangulated the origin of the message, and cross-referenced it with the known bases of all the people looking for you.”

“Of which there are… _so_ many. And they all seem to have the resources to follow through,” Ivy interjects, shuddering.

Player nods in Ivy’s direction, conceding the point. “Right, exactly. V.I.L.E. knows how to cover their tracks. So does A.C.M.E. The person who sent this message wasn’t even trying to hide where they are.”

“So, maybe it’s a trap.” Carmen doesn’t think so. But she’s playing the devil’s advocate to shush the part of her that really, really, _really_ wants it to be Jules. 

Player’s eyes flick over to Carmen. “First off, I never thought I’d see the day you pointed out a potential trap before me. Secondly — and more to the point — the message says they just want a chance to apologise.”

A beat passes while this sinks in.

“So it is Jules,” Carmen says faintly. 

“It’s also definitely a trap.” Ivy glances at her, worried. “A.C.M.E. knows your weak spot, and they’re using it to try capture you again. It almost worked once before.” 

“We don’t know that that’s what happened in Stockholm,” Carmen objects.

Almost simultaneously, Player addresses her: “So you admit that Agent Argent is your weak spot.”

She blushes.

“Wow, your cheeks just turned pink.” Player peers at her from the screen.

“That’s just the lighting,” Carmen says quickly. 

“No, it isn’t. They really are flushed.” Since when is Ivy such a snitch?

“Well, I was doing static exercises,” Carmen mutters, wincing at the dead giveaway of the defensive tone she’s unwittingly adopted.

Player clears his throat, sparing her from coming up with equally, if not more, lame excuses. “So what’ll it be, Red? If you keep it under five minutes, I can run a programme to stop anyone from tracing where you are. It’s still risky, because they might be expecting that, but...”

Carmen’s quiet for a long moment. She can feel both her friends watching her.

“Can I have some privacy?” she says at last. Her decision is implied — actually, it was almost inevitable. 

“We won’t eavesdrop,” Player promises, already tapping away on his keyboard.

“He doesn’t speak for me,” Ivy counters. But she leaves the room anyway, shutting the door behind her with one last look at Carmen, and an ambivalent air of supportiveness mixed with disapproval.

Carmen takes a breath to steady herself. She needs to have this conversation, and the closure it promises. For both their sakes. It’s just... difficult.

Just as the video call goes through, she realises that she still looks kind of sweaty, and tugs a small towel off the arm of the couch. She’s still dabbing at her face and neck with it when a familiar, accented voice comes from the laptop: “Oh!”

Jules. Just seeing her face — even by the harsh glare coming off the screen — is enough to send an echo of pain zigzagging through Carmen. _You will not see a single one of our agents. Trust me._

“Y-You look well,” Jules stammers, a little tentative but warm. Relieved, actually, as she looks Carmen over.

_You look like you haven’t been sleeping much_, Carmen thinks, noticing now the shadows under her eyes, the uncharacteristically mussed fringe. _Or at all._

Jules, in turn, has been noticing her continued silence. “I’m terribly sorry,” she says, with a clipped politeness that would have sounded arch and exaggerated, coming from anyone else. From her, though, it can’t be anything but sincere.

But then, maybe Carmen isn’t as good a judge of character as she thought. _Trust you, huh?_

“Is this a bad time?” Jules asks. Her eyes follow the arc of Carmen’s towel as she slings it across her shoulders. 

There’s no other time, really. She has five minutes with Jules. She has to make the most of them, even if she doesn’t quite know how to talk to her.

Which has never been the case before. That’s the thing. From the start, it felt like they were on the same page. And now she can’t get it out of her head: the moment when all those A.C.M.E. agents suddenly appeared in the bell tower. The sound of Jules saying _No, it’s not what you think_. The first time she’s ever been unsure if Jules was telling her the truth. 

_Never mind that_, she scolds herself. _Just… be Carmen Sandiego, right now._ Self-assured. Unflappable.

She lets the corner of her mouth quirk up. “Of all things, Julia, I doubt I’d fault you for having bad timing.”

A small furrow appears in the other woman’s brow. “Yes, I… I have some explaining to do. Please. I never meant to cause you any harm.” 

When Carmen doesn’t say anything to that, she cautiously continues. “I asked to speak to you alone, truly, I did. But my boss and my partner went behind my back. They don’t believe what I believe.”

It’s difficult to resist the urge to just believe her and forgive her, when Jules is sounding so earnest and so… like she’s been betrayed herself.

“What do you believe, Julia?” she asks. Only a little belatedly. Only a little shy of the confident tone she would have, if she were on her game.

Jules is ready with her answer. “I believe that you’re not the notorious thief everyone says you are.”

“I _am_ a thief,” Carmen corrects her. Here’s some firm ground for her to speak from. “And quite a good one, too, so if there’s any notoriety to my reputation, I’d say I deserve it.” 

“Precisely!”

So saying, Jules leans closer to the webcam. In her eagerness, she actually moves a little out of focus. Carmen struggles not to find that endearing. It’s the same feeling Jules’s awkward catwalk in Milan gave her. Kind of like she wants to play with her. Bring her on board for a caper, take her on an adventure. But also kind of like she wants to protect her.

“You are precisely that, Ms. Sandiego. A _good_ thief. I—”

“Hold up,” Carmen interrupts. “What’s with this ‘Ms. Sandiego’ business?” 

Jules’s brow pinches some more, and her shoulders slump ever so slightly. “I didn’t want to presume. After all, you… you’re addressing me as ‘Julia’.”

Carmen’s stomach suddenly feels like it has a sliver of ice in it.

“You’ve never done that,” she adds. “You’ve always called me ‘Jules’.”

“I… didn’t know you’d noticed.” She barely noticed herself that she was doing it. Must have been a subconscious way of trying to keep her guard up, when she’s never done that around Jules before. Never had cause to.

“Of course I did. No one’s ever — um. That is…” Jules cuts herself off. “In any case, I noticed.”

Carmen watches her curiously, wondering what she was about to say. Then she notices the timer Player has set up in the corner of her screen. Best to get right to the heart of the matter.

“Let’s say I believe that you think I’m some Robin Hood type. Let’s say I even believe you didn’t know you were the bait in a trap set for me.”

She takes a deep breath. “I still nearly died because I trusted you. How am I supposed to move on, like that never happened?”

Almost immediately, she regrets serving the hardball.

“I don’t have an answer for that.” Jules’s voice is quivering dangerously close to tears. “At least, not one that I’d want to give you right now, in these circumstances.”

What in the world does _that_ mean?

“All I can say is that I’m glad to see you’re recuperating quickly. And I wanted — I _want_ you… to trust me.”

Then she looks up, and some fire has returned to her expression. Her round glasses glint fiercely in the light from the screen. “And here’s the thing: I think you still do.”

Carmen gives her a sardonic look, as if to say _go on, tell me why _that_ makes any sense._

Now there’s that righteousness back in Jules’s voice. That spark of intelligence, and that foundation of self-assuredness in her own deductions. “Why else would you choose to hear me out? To answer my hails on the off-chance it wasn’t another trap? You’ve been smart enough to elude law enforcement for this long. But something made you take this risk.”

…Yeah, she’s got her there.

Jules must read her success in Carmen’s expression, because she presses on. “You do trust me, despite everything. Despite the fact that I put you through — forgive my language — I put you through _hell_, because of my negligence. Because I sat by and watched.” 

“Hold on,” Carmen stops her, holding a hand up. “That’s taking it way too far—”

“I’m not talking about Stockholm!”

That takes her by enough surprise that she shuts up for a moment. During which, she wonders how she’s lost so much ground in this conversation. How she’s ended up defending Jules, instead of sitting back and hearing out her apology. Such as it is.

Jules purses her lips, likely unused to raising her voice. Or perhaps just steeling herself, because the next thing she says is, “I mean that I figured it out… in Poitiers. The first time, in Poitiers.”

Carmen gapes.

Dully, almost wearily, Jules goes on. “I looked up the records, and all your thefts in Switzerland, Cairo, and Shanghai were tied to the same company. It possessed valuables presumed missing for months, even years in some cases. I theorised that you were a thief who only steals from other thieves.

“I was even more sure when you saved the Medicis. Then in Stockholm, I tested it out on you. I suggested you were there to prevent someone else from stealing something. You didn’t correct me, which confirmed it.”

“As much as the word of a thief can be trusted, you mean?” Carmen interjects.

Jules doesn’t rise to the bait. She only looks at Carmen with guilt in her eyes. “You all but told me. Only I already knew.” 

Carmen takes a moment to summarise. “So you’ve known since Poitiers — and you still came after me.”

“Yes,” Jules affirms unhappily. “I was new to Interpol. Nobody there was going to trust the gut instincts of a green agent. And now I’m new to A.C.M.E. After Milan, I tried to convince Chief to recruit you, not capture you, but you know how that turned out.”

It’s true, about how such bureaucratic organisations work. But… 

“You still could’ve refused,” Carmen insists, frowning. “How can you let other people tell you what to think?”

“I don’t know!” Unlike at the start of their conversation, Jules is anything but polite and collected now. Carmen’s never seen her so exasperated, so agitated. “Haven’t you ever chosen a path that you thought you wanted, that you _know_ you’re good at, only to find that people higher up want to control what you do with your skills?”

Oof. 

“Actually, yes.” Carmen cocks her head at Jules. She smirks at the irony of what she’s decided, on the spur of the moment, to reveal. “But I guess I’ve always been a bit of a black sheep.”

Jules exhales noisily and just watches her for a second. Carmen can practically see the gears turning in her head as she processes this latest clue, filing it away in her methodical, organised mind.

Instead of theorising some more, though, Jules utters a complete non-sequitur. “Why _do_ you trust me?”

Hoo, boy. Carmen glances at the countdown. Their five minutes are almost up. Not that ten minutes, or even ten hours, would be enough time for her to articulate all that she thinks about Jules. All that she’s beginning to suspect she feels. 

She sighs a long, deep sigh. 

“I don’t know that I do still trust you. Apparently, I do. Apparently, I can’t help it.”

Jules goggles, but lets her continue uninterrupted.

“You said you wanted to apologise, but mainly what I wanted… was just to see you again.”

Carmen’s rarely ever felt shy, especially since the moment she donned her bright red fedora and coat. She’s used to being conspicuous, upfront, slick. She’s even tried that tactic here — not that it helped much.

But now she finds herself wanting to drop her gaze and duck her head, rather than look at Jules as she shrugs and simply says, “I hate how we left things.” 

For the space of five rapid heartbeats, she thinks she’s admitted too much, come too close to the truth and scared Jules off with her own vulnerability. But then the other woman chimes in, “I do, too. In the forest, when I found you—”

“Wait, _you_ found me?” 

Jules waves a hand dismissively. “I knew you would hesitate to turn on my communicator and allow Chief to track your location. So I pulled up data from your glider’s path in Rio de Janeiro. I used it to model your likely trajectory from the bell tower, and then got access to satellite images of the area through my A.C.M.E. clearance.”

A rush of warmth floods through Carmen. She survived because of Jules’s quick thinking. The signal was weak, after all, when she finally did activate the pen. 

“Thank you.” She’s never said the words so fervently before. 

But Jules only looks guilty. “I was part of the reason you needed rescuing in the first place. And it was that, or spend the interim worrying myself sick.” 

Carmen blinks, taken aback. “You—?”

“My point is,” Jules hurries to say, “when A.C.M.E. came to get you, and you chose to go with your friends… you looked at me like I wasn’t one anymore. Your friend, that is.”

She pushes her round glasses up and leans forward again. “Which was strange, because I never realised before that I was your friend. As soon as I did, I knew I wanted that back. I knew I’d let you down.” 

Carmen raises a wary eyebrow at her. “You do realise we’re on opposite sides of this, don’t you? You’re the cop, I’m the robber. It’s basic playground rules.” 

“Yes, rules. Logic. Deduction,” Jules muses. “You know, I’ve been advised to trust my mind and not my gut, when it comes to you.”

She gulps visibly and tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear. This is hard for her to articulate, to admit.

“But around you,” Jules says quietly, “I find I believe less in what’s _lawful_, and more in what’s _right_.”

Carmen can feel her expression softening, despite her initial resolve. She wants to offer — what? Comfort? Sympathy, for how torn she sounds?

“Jules," she starts to say.

And the video cuts out. 

She’s left staring at a blank screen for a moment, until Player reappears on it. “Sorry!” he says, right off the bat. “I gave you an extra two minutes — as long as I could manage with only minor tweaks to the base code.”

He pauses, noticing the look on her face. “I cut you off at a bad time, didn’t I?” 

Still dazed, Carmen takes a while to sort through what he’s saying, past the echoes of Jules asking _Is this a bad time?_

“That’s okay, Player,” she says finally. She glances at Jules’s communicator, still lying on the far end of the table. “You’re right. It’s best not to risk it.”

He frowns at her, tilting his head. “Are we still talking about the logistics of the call, or its contents?”

She knows how smart her friend is, but sometimes it still surprises her how he can go right to the heart of the matter. How he knows her so well. 

“Red?” he prompts. “This wasn’t a mistake, was it?”

Carmen considers the question. _Jules_, she called her. Instinctively, even after what’s happened. 

“No,” she replies, beginning to smile. “No, I don’t think it was.” 

After all, what do rules have on what feels right?

**Author's Note:**

> I suppose this is canon divergent from 2x09, since this Carmen would trust Julia more than she trusts Chief and A.C.M.E.
> 
> Title from Believe by Mumford & Sons, which is also mood music. Additional notes in my [tumblr post](https://mimosaeyes.tumblr.com/post/188496935922/running-through-these-walls-mimosaeyes-carmen).


End file.
